Britain needs fewer students and fewer 'universities'

The most inadvertently funny episode of the whole student fees debate has come in the Guardian, in the form of one of those pompous group letters that appear in the paper from time to time (the ones that always contain the greatly paid and good of the quangocracy, a few academics from “universities” no one has ever heard of, some luvvies, and Tony Benn).

They wrote: “If there is no public funding, then there will be no cap on student numbers for institutions. Humanities departments in 'elite' universities will only survive by increased student recruitment, serviced at low costs. And what prospect is there that research in the arts, humanities and social sciences will survive the cut in the research budget?

“We call on all the vice-chancellors of universities in the UK to voice their implacable opposition to the Browne report.”

Worst of all, they said: "Browne’s plans will drive whole fields of knowledge into decline". And as Laban Tall pointed out, the academics who signed the letter taught such vital fields of knowledge as:

While I have some sympathy for the students, the current problems are a direct legacy of Labour’s insane plans to increase university admission to 50 per cent of the population, i.e. anyone who is of average intelligence. This was based on the fallacy that, since university graduates tend to be better paid than the population at large, simply by increasing the number of graduates we could make the population richer. Only someone who attended university could think up an idea so stupid.

It's even potentially dangerous. According to Theodore Dalrymple, the civil war in Guatemala was partly caused by the increase in higher education places, which left a whole swathe of the population angry and bitter that their supposed degrees were as worthless as 1920s-era marks. Although we’re not going to have a civil war, the current system is certainly not just financial unsustainable but also a cruel lie that builds unfair hopes. People have been deceived into believing that if they take worthless academic courses, rather than practical, vocational training, they will somehow fill positions of cultural importance that simply don't exist. In the United States most degrees cost far more than £9,000 but students understand that these qualifications will usually increase their earning power; sadly for British students, many of the degrees they are taking will leave them with nothing but a huge debt, an alcohol problem and political indoctrination.

For as Michael Burleigh says in the introduction to The New Culture Forum’s collection of essays, A Sorry State, many universities “which churn out the humanities and social science graduates who are so generously represented on our landscape” have achieved a “mysterious” uniformity of opinion across the country.

And as Emma French writes in her essay "Cultural self-laceration in British universities", which appears in the collection, these expanded humanities departments wield enormous cultural power, so that “More and more students are learning that self-hatred and the revision of past achievements is the position of the ‘educated’.”

As the Saudi king might say, you need to cut off the snake’s head. We need fewer students and fewer universities, not just for the sake of our finances and the students' future prospects, but for the very health of our culture.